geofrog 's review for:

I Will Always Love You by Cecily von Ziegesar

2.0

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This is the twelfth and final book in the Gossip Girl book series, and the thirteenth book chronologically if you count the prequel. Blair, Serena, Nate, Dan, and Vanessa graduated and went off to live their lives. Now they're coming home for the holidays. A lot can change in a few months, but some things never do. I liked seeing how things changed for the characters in this book since there wasn’t much character progression in the first eleven books. Dan’s poetry was as pretentious as ever, but I liked seeing Vanessa pursue her passion for filmmaking. I liked seeing the glimpses into the changed lives of these characters, I just wish there were interesting character developments in all of the books. I liked how this story begins with Serena and Blair in different places than where they were in previous books, with Serena as a successful famous actress and Blair attending Yale while in a committed relationship with a man that wasn’t Nate. I liked how Nate’s character returns to the Upper East Side after running away from himself and his mistakes. It was interesting seeing Chuck as a changed man, despite being a lesser secondary character in the book series. I liked seeing Jenny return for the final book, but she deserved a better storyline than rehashing things with Nate. The love triangle between Serena, Blair, and Nate finally felt interesting (at the beginning) because the characters have grown a little and the stakes were higher because this is the last book in the series, but I still would have preferred this storyline if it had been a true love triangle with Blair and Serena also having romantic feelings for each other. I liked how the characters started off different and more grown, but they quickly devolved into their old selves and the middle of the story becomes a rehash of the same storytelling beats from every other book in the series, with the characters running around in circles and having minimal to no character or plot progression featuring storylines we’ve already explored multiple times before.